Hold on there dude. We absolutely do NOT know that. The ten-thousand year curtain that linguists cannot see behind is just as opaque in the Western Hemisphere as in the Eastern. We have not found the commonalities between the languages of Central and South America and the languages of the western USA and Canada that would bind them into a single 15,000-year old language family. We also cannot correlate them with the languages of the relatives they left behind in Siberia, who are easy to identify from their DNA. So as of today we cannot say that they brought language with them. For all we know their two proto-languages were both invented here, and the Siberians invented their proto-language after their kinfolk left.For sure. The first archeological evidence of cultivated plants (peppers) is around 9000BCE. For thousands of years after the entire hemisphere was populated (except for the Arctic region), all those people were nomadic hunter-gatherers.

And this did not occur north of the Rio Grande. Agriculture came much later to the upper reaches of North America, IIRC sometime in the 1st Millennium BCE, about the time that the Olmecs and the ancestors of the Incas were already starting to build cities. When the Europeans arrived they found (and obliterated) thriving Bronze Age civilizations in Central and South America, but in North America a few tribes had invented farming (but not animal husbandry except for very small ones like turkeys) and formed trading networks, but they still relied heavily on hunting for food, and most of the tribes up here were still essentially nomadic.

We could blame this--or at least correlate it--with their failure to domesticate any beasts of burden. Yet the Olmecs didn't even have any large grazers to tame (our bison, mountain goats and caribou/reindeer don't range that far down), and they built cities with only human labor.

Either way - and I find the hypothesis of a people as sophisticated and physically modern as any not being able to talk wildly unlikely in itself, and when combined with proposed multiple and coincidental inventions of human language on an accelerated schedule untenable - we have people who could talk without farming.

There is nothing particularly complex about hoe agriculture anyway - hunting and gathering in new environments, tool manufacturing and clothing and coordinated child raising, are at least as demanding on communication skills.

The hypothesis that the technology of language was invented far back in the Paleolithic Era--at the latest right before the diaspora out of Africa--is certainly not extraordinary. If it's ever disproved all the linguists will faint in shock. Nonetheless we have no way of proving it beyond a reasonable doubt, so it will remain only a hypothesis, not a canonical theory--or to use the horrible term popular among laymen and abetted by scientists, a scientific fact.That requires no speculation. The Neolithic Revolution never happened in Australia. When the Europeans arrived the native people were still hunter-gatherers and they have several language families.There's much more to farming than hoeing. The physical labor may be within the abilities of a trained chimpanzee, but not the conceptualization. First you have to figure out that plants grow from seeds (or rhizomes, etc.) and are nurtured by water. That requires a one-year cycle observation span--from nomadic hunter-gatherers who don't stay in one place very long. Furthermore, the first solid archeological evidence of farming, of necessity, is the DNA of hybridized plants which could not have occurred naturally. This means gathering specimens of two species or subspecies of plants, planting them in the same garden, discovering the hybrid offspring, deciding that you like them better because of their taste, hardiness or yield, and cultivating them.Other pack-social species perform communal childrearing. And many species adapt to new environments. The idiots who decided in the 1880s that America would not be a proper home without all the English birds mentioned by Shakespeare arguably did as much damage to our ecosystem as the loggers, miners, farmers and architects. The house sparrow alone has been spectacularly successful, crowding out native species from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, and we won't talk about the damn starlings. Rabbits take over wombat burrows in Australia--another ecological disaster wrought by idiots.

Tool building--maybe. But I've often wondered whether people who work with their hands and eyes--sculptors, plumbers, photographers, etc., form fewer of their thoughts in words than the rest of us.

All of that is matched by the conceptualizations involved in hunting and gathering. The use of fire to "improve" hunting grounds, for example, is at least as sophisticated as the cultivation and encouragement of seeds of favored plants - something gatherers do, as well as farmers.

Depends on one's notion of "reasonable", I suppose, but the idea that the early migrants to North America had no real human language seems quite farfetched to me.
Their wives don't.

"Reasonable" means "based on logical reasoning." Deaf people communicate just fine without vocal language. (Sign language does not need all that exquisite vocal apparatus, and am I right that it also doesn't use the same speech center?) So the question is whether deaf people could have accomplished everything that hearing people accomplished over the millennia, leading up to a civilization in which deaf people can get along so well.It's been postulated (again not beyond a reasonable doubt) that division of labor between the sexes in the Paleolithic Era was not as exaggerated as it became in historical times. It was not possible for a tribe to have as many children within it when they were nomads and there was no food surplus. Therefore it's reasonable to speculate that women were able--and expected--to engage in the same occupations as men during the considerable time when they were not pregnant or nursing.

? What are you talking about?
Regardless, how does that affect the chances of humans without language not only colonizing the world as the dominant and sophisticated predator with complex tools and arts (cooking,sewing, eight year childraising) and remarkable adaptations to widely varied landscapes, but all developing language independently everywhere they went after none of them needing it for all those thousands of years?

You asked what a "reasonable" doubt would be. My answer is that since deaf people are capable of toolmaking, farming and animal husbandry, it is reasonable to suggest that hearing people without spoken language could have accomplished all of the same things, and thereby progressed all the way to the Neolithic Revolution without inventing the technology of spoken language. The Agricultural Revolution happened in many different places and each of those places has one or more language families, which have no discernible relationship to the language families of the other places.

A scenario is presented in which humans advanced to a very high level of culture without spoken language, and I submit that this scenario is reasonable, based upon the things we can observe people without spoken language doing in our midst today.

Until the 1980s it was thought that Neanderthals did not have the physiology for speech. Jean Auel, in her Earth's Children series of novels (beginning with Clan of the Cave Bear) portrayed them as having a very sophisticated sign language. Anthropologists (with whom she had consulted extensively) were quite sanguine about this.I have already gone on record with my vote for the language-is-ancient position. You don't have to convince me. But neither of us, nor anyone else, has enough evidence to prove our hypothesis beyond a reasonable doubt. My devil's-advocate hypothesis to the contrary expresses that reasonable doubt. The fact that anthropologists readily accepted Jean Auel's scholarship-based hypothesis implies that they share my reasonable doubt.

As for language being invented independently in multiple locations, that was the case with many key technologies, including at least one Paradigm Shift:

• The bow and arrow
• Farming
• Animal husbandry
• Pottery
• Civilization
• Writing
• Metallurgy

It's hardly an extraordinary hypothesis.

That's nonsense. You haven't even pointed to a culture of deaf people that have done any of that stuff, much less a culture of humans with all the physiology and achievements and no language.
You aren't seriously comparing language - a universal feature of human existence, almost a defining characteristic of the species - with the bow and arrow?

Note that, just the most obvious, there are no such gadgets that all humans have invented, independently. Whereas we are supposed to believe that all humans, everywhere, after developing all that culture and populating the planet with all that sophisticated adaptation, suddenly and more or less simultaneously invented language? What for?
C'mon - all the evidence is stacked against it, it's completely without either evidence or motive of its own, it's ridiculous.

Deaf/Mute people are taught language that was invented by speaking people.
Furthermore, sign language IS complex language – it’s not about the sounds, but the communication of ideas.

Going back to what I was saying about parrots…
The physical capacity for language is such a very small aspect of it. Hell, my dog makes enough diverse sounds to be able to form a complex language. Without the mental capacity for abstract thought, it is not possible to have complex language.
It is highly unlikely that any form of complex language was created before spoken language and without some capacity for consideration of the future, planning for that future and communication of ideas, I can’t see how farming could have been possible.
Language must have been created before (or at the very least, with) farming.



Add cultivation of fire for cooking to that list.
It was grasped in many disparate locations at about the same time, without communication between those different locations.